If the movie ''The Insider'' made anything clear about Jeffrey S. Wigand, it is this: Trying to shut him up is futile, and is only liable to make him talk more about tobacco companies. For that reason alone, his treatment by the Pataki administration...

The Brown & Williamson tobacco company is conducting a poll of people who watched the film ''The Insider'' to help decide whether to file a libel suit against the film's distributor, the Walt Disney Company, a spokesman said. Filmgoers here and...

Late in ''The Insider'' the tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand sits despondently in a hotel room and contemplates the steep price of what he has done. The setting is somber except for the bright pastoral mural on the wall behind him,...

Mike Wallace says he still has not seen the movie ''The Insider,'' Michael's Mann's re-creation of the most turbulent moments of Mr. Wallace's professional life as a correspondent for CBS's ''60 Minutes.'' But after many months of anguish about...

Film Promotion From a Distance Chris O'Donnell has been in New Zealand for the last four months, up on top of a mountain most days, and he's only halfway through shooting ''Vertical Limit,'' a thriller about trapped climbers that is set for...

It was not the first time it had happened. Sitting with some friends in a bar-restaurant, still energized from accepting his first honorary doctorate, Jeffrey S. Wigand noticed a man approaching from the bar. ''He started shouting at me in a very...

Just when the American media had checked out of Monicagate rehab, secure in the knowledge that only shut-ins have time for the press-bashing panels on C-Span or the ecclesiastical prose of Brill's Content, along comes Hollywood to ruin everything. In...

Four years after one of the low points in the history of CBS News, its decision not to broadcast an exclusive ''60 Minutes'' interview with a tobacco industry whistle-blower, a furious battle of egos and spin is unfolding over a film drama about the...